The Pit

In the darkness, there is only the pit. In the pit, there is nothing. There is no escape, no hope. Only the pit.

In the 1970s, researcher Harry Harlow conducted a new series of experiments on rhesus macaque monkeys. He would place young monkeys in an isolation chamber for weeks—sometimes for a year. Harlow had spent years studying the “nature of love,” but after his wife died, he wanted to study something else: depression. When placed in the chamber, the monkeys would try to escape. After a few days, they gave up. A few days after that, they stopped moving completely and huddled in the corner. Harlow called it the “pit of despair.”

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All I can remember is the darkness.

It was the darkness of the void—the all-consuming, uninterrupted darkness of eternal night before the slithering mass of creation wormed its way into the light.

I waited for my eyes to adjust, but I waited for an aeon and saw only unending, undefinable, featureless dark. There was nothing to see because there was nothing to see.

I groped my hands in the black sea and felt nothing. A few tremulous steps forward—still nothing. I reached down to feel the ground on which I stood and it felt cool to the touch—and smooth. I turned in circles; held my breath and listened. But all I could hear were the invisible machinations of my body: the blood pumping in my neck, my intestines shivering in their own dark passages, nerves creeping through the drafty, derelict halls of my spine.

Picking a random direction, I strode forward. In only a few steps, I felt the cool touch of metal, the same as the floor. The walls sloped down and inward, seamlessly transitioning from wall to floor in a smooth curve. The walls bent in a circle, and after a single circumference, I had a sense of my imprisonment as a smooth, shallow bowl. I tried to leap and scale the walls, but there was nothing to grab hold of, and I slipped down the polished metal.

I could not recall how I had come to be in that state. I couldn’t remember any of my life before the darkness. It was as if I had always been there—sprung fully formed into that smooth, metallic pit.

No, wait. I remembered a wife—sun-shaped earrings next to light blonde hair— and a son—tiny arms reaching for a hug— and a little blue house with a yellow wreath on the door. Or was that a dream? In the pitch black of the pit, it was hard for me to tell if I was asleep or awake. But that was an arbitrary distinction, I realized, for in that complete darkness, my mind wandered among strange places.

I imagined—or dreamt—I was in a forest, the trees tall and sharply bare. Everything was burned. The trees were black and scarred, the forest floor covered with embers, here and there a red fire lily poking through the ash. There was a thin layer of fog, obscuring my view. The trees had sinister burned faces that leered out of the fog. I heard shrieks high in the broken branches and caught glimpses of strange human-bird creatures flying through the dead trees. They came down to attack me, digging at my face with their claws.

But I was still in the pit. I tried—for a time—to escape, but the featureless walls frustrated every attempt. I had a sense, though I could not confirm it—the all-pervading darkness was was uniform as the deepest reaches of space—that the walls of the pit were not very high; that only a few feet above my head was a platform and a door that led to my salvation.

I thought that I could carve a ledge out of the metal, something to grab ahold of and boost myself over. But I had no tools, nothing, so I took my nails to a spot on the wall, hoping to create—nail by arduous nail—a tiny groove. 

For hours, days, weeks, I worked at the same spot until all my nails broke and my fingers bled. Still, I kept at it. I lost track of time. Had years passed or merely months? Time didn’t make sense, couldn’t make sense in the void. I worked my fingers down to the bone, but it was impossible to determine if I made any progress. If only I could know for sure my efforts were pushing me forward, even the smallest, most incremental step forward, I could keep going. 

But I feared it was all in vain, that my efforts accomplished nothing but unnecessary pain.

I abandoned my work, moved to the center of the pit, curled up on the floor, my head resting on the cool metal, and went to sleep.

I dreamed I was in a towering skyscraper. Below me I could hear the roar and swell of the sea. The tower was full of lavish apartments, all of them richly decorated and stylishly arranged. But they were all empty. There was no one in the tower but me. I roamed from apartment to apartment, spending a few days in one, a few months in another. All of the rooms had televisions mounted to the walls, but all the channels were static. Half the apartments looked out of the sea, the gray watery wastes rising and falling in repetitive waves, the same day after day. The other half had a view of desolate fields. Dead grass, ruined roads, little fires scattered across the countryside; a permanent haze in the air. The sky was orange, and night never came to the tower.

Eventually, I wore out all the apartments and went to the top floor. There I found an astronomy tower and an old man with a blue robe dotted with stars. He looked through a telescope and said nothing except the location of the planets. “Mercury retrograde in the fourth house. Moon square Saturn. Venus in the sixth house.” There was a book on a small table, and I sat for days leafing through it, listening to the man describe the planetary positions. The book contained no text, only pictures of twisted, deformed human bodies: faces with extra eyes, torsos with missing limbs, festering wounds, faces contorted into expressions of extreme pain or pleasure.

I stepped into the sky and found myself flying toward the bright sun. I was no longer in the tower but found myself in a little blue house with a yellow wreath on the door. I could see nothing but wide-open sky through all the windows. I saw a woman fly by on a motorcycle. She wore a white dress dotted with pale yellow sunflowers. There was something familiar about her, but I could not place where. I watched her arc through the endless blue sky until she crashed into a deep lake. I brought the house down onto the water, the waves lapping at my porch. I stood outside the front door and called for her, waiting to see her emerge from the water. But she never appeared. 

I was always on the metal floor of the pit, lost to darkness. I neither ate nor thought of hunger. I even came to forget the sounds of my own pleading body. For who was I in the pit? There was no space for an “I” in that darkness. I was nothing. I was eternity. I was not.

Then I saw light.

It was a thin band appearing in the darkness—blindingly bright. The band widened into a square and I saw a human-shaped shadow standing there.

Then came a sharp voice that I knew. “Harry, is that you? What are you doing down there?”

It was my wife’s voice, I realized. Carol’s voice! Carol had come to rescue me from the dark. But there was an edge to her voice, a pointed tinge of frustration mixed with exhaustion.

“Harry, get up,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re still down there. Do you know what time it is? Johnny needs to be picked up from soccer practice. You promised me you’d do it this week. You promised me you’d help out more.”

My wife’s shadow disappeared, and the pit was flooded with light, and I remembered who I was. I remembered a mortgage forty leagues underwater; inflation obliterating a meagre savings account; maxed out credit cards decades away from paying off; a dishwasher on the fritz; no job prospects and unemployment drying up; high cholesterol; four root canals; weight higher and higher every time I stepped on the scale.

“I’m going,” I said.

“I can’t believe you forgot. The one time I ask you to do something, to help me out.”

“I’m going, I’m going.” I stepped out of the pit and followed Carol through the door. I crossed through our living room—toys scattered everywhere—into the garage and got into the car. As I backed out of the driveway, I could see, in the fading afternoon light, that the yellow wreath had fallen off our door and lay crumpled on the dirty stoop.

I thought I knew the way to Johnny’s school, but the streets were longer than I remembered. They twisted and turned in unexpected places, and the trees had an unfamiliar, sinister look to them. Somehow, I ended up in a dead end. The sun was setting. I was going to be late. The coach would be angry with me; or he would go home, leaving Johnny alone in the dark parking lot. The fading light illuminated the tops of the trees, bathing the little neighborhood houses in golden light. It was beautiful, idyllic in a way I could not understand. All I could feel was a humming exhaustion deep in my bones.

I retraced my route and tried a different direction. It was hard to concentrate on what I was doing. I turned on the radio but all I heard was terror: war in the Ukraine, threats of nuclear annihilation, terrorist attacks in Israel, uncontrolled wildfires in California, tumbling stock prices and mass layoffs, hyperinflation, riots, school shootings, rising sea levels, and record heat waves. I turned off the radio and drive in silence as the darkness fell.

At last I came to the school. It was night and there were no kids or coaches at the curb. I went inside, but as I roamed the halls looking for my son, I realized I was in the wrong place. It wasn’t Johnny’s elementary school, it was my old high school.

I found my way into Mrs. Delgado’s classroom. She was there, writing the conjugations for the verb ser on the blackboard. A sunflower stood on her desk in a little clear vase.

“I’m looking for my son,” I said.

Mrs. Delgado turned and gave me a sad smile. “I know.”

“He’s not here, though, is he?”

Mrs. Delgado shook her head.

“But you’re here.”

She frowned. “I suppose that’s true,” she said.

“But how can that be,” I said. “You died. You had cancer. That was over twenty years ago. I remember because I prayed every night that you should be spared.”

“That was very kind of you.”

“It’s why I’m an atheist,” I said. “I prayed to God that you should not die, but you died anyway. Why should you have to die? It didn’t seem fair. You were the kindest, sweetest teacher. Everyone knew it. You worked so hard for us, gave us your time, paid for everything in your classroom yourself. But still you died.”

“That’s how it is sometimes.” Mrs. Delgado took a piece of chalk and began writing a new set of conjugations on the blackboard for the verb estar.

“But how can you be here if you’re dead.”

Mrs. Delgado shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Is this the afterlife?” I said. “Is this … hell?” I looked about the room, as if expecting to see pits of hell-fire, demons clambering out of the little desks.

“I wouldn’t know,” Mrs. Delgado said. She went back to writing on the blackboard.

“Well, are you miserable? Are you in pain? Eternal agony?  It’s dark outside and you’re writing verbs for an empty classroom.”

Mrs. Delgado stopped writing and thought for a moment. “No,” she said. “I am mostly bored.”

I returned to the car and found Carol in the passenger seat. I was afraid she would be angry, chastise me for failing to pick up our son in time. But she smiled at me, and I saw that she had straightened her hair. She wore a pair of sparkling earrings shaped like the sun. There was a light layer of makeup on her face, eyeliner and mascara.

I got into the car next to her. “You look beautiful,” I said.

“I wanted to make the effort for you.” She took my hand and squeezed it.

“I’m still in the pit, aren’t I?”

Carol nodded, and I could see tears at the corners of her eyes. Those beautiful, blue eyes, the eyes that used to dance like stars when they looked at me. “I don’t know how to help you,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say except “I love you.”

Tears were streaming down Carol’s face. They fell onto her shirt, the nice purple shirt that I had gotten her for our anniversary. I wanted to tell her to stop crying, that her makeup was running, that she would ruin her shirt.

“Your son needs you.”

“I’m tired.”

“I need you.”

“I’m … I’m tired.”

“I still love you,” she said and she laid her head on my shoulder. I drove us back home. Carol didn’t say anything else. She stared out the window, the tears drying on her face.

I returned to the room with the pit. But the walls had changed. They were gone and I could see the entire world surrounding the pit. Everything was on fire, and the sky was thick with orange sulfurous clouds. I could hear the sounds of children playing, their voices carried on the wind, but they were far away, and I could not see them. Was my son among them? One of the voices far in the distance? What would happen to him? To the other children I could hear?

But soon their voices dispersed and I heard only the wind. I understood that everyone was dead—or would be soon—and that it did not matter. The sky was a burning vortex, beautiful and terrible at the same time.

I climbed into the pit, curled into a ball, and went to sleep.